Leslie Marmon Silko - ScholarWorks

by Per Seyeo.led
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BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY
BOISE, IDAHO
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Boise State University Western Writers Series
Number 45
By Per Seyersted
University of Oslo, Norway
Edito n: Wilyne Chiltlerton
Jilmta H . Magui..e
Swine.. Milnilger:
Jilrnta Hadden
Co~r
Design
by Amy Skoy, Copyright 1980
Co~r
llIustriltion by Leslie
Milrmon Silko from LagUFWl W OlR4n.
Used by permission of the iln illi.
Boise State University, Boise, Idaho
Copyrigh l 1980
by the
Boix Stale Uni\'le'nily Wn.l ern W riten Serin
ALL RIGHTS RESERV ED
Library of Congrnl' Card No. 80-70460
In terna tiona l Sta nd ard Book No. O·884 !lO·06 9·l!
Pri nted in !he United Sta tn of Ameri ca by
J .. 0 Printing
Mnidian . Id aho
teJlie /lt1l,.",t11
Silk~
In 1978 when Leslie Marmon Sitko was lecturing in Norway ana
one day happened to see the figures on the iron plates in my
fireplace, she immediately exclaimed: "O h there you have the three
goats from that Norwegian fairyralel" As she then told me, twenty
years earlier her fifth grade teac her had read to the class from a large
volume of Scandinavian ta les , whereupon she had asked for the book
and read them all herself. including the one sh e now saw illustrated
in front of her .
This littleincident shows how. at an early age. she wasalready actively in terested in stories and how they remain vivid with her . Raised in Old
Laguna in New Mexico. her self partly Laguna Pueblo (and partly
white and Mexican), she was spurred in th is interest by the love of
storytelling and the strong oral tradition of her tribe : for centuries
they have kept alive and renewed a rich store of tal es about mythical.
historical , and current figures and events .
Laguna material forms the b asis for nearly all of Sitko's work , including her first piece to see print , the story "The Man to Send Ra in
Clouds " (1969) . With thi s widely anthologized ta le and her other
published short writings -most of which will be made avai lable in
the collection Storyteller (due to appear in 1981) - she put Laguna on
the litera ry map and p laced herself in the forefront of Native
American authors. She early won prestigious literary prizes, and in
the novel Ceremony ( 1977) she demonstrated such artis try in her
transfonnation of local material into general sign ificance that the
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en th usiastic r evi ew ers welcomed her as a n impo rtan t Ameri can
wri ter .
When Columbus mi stakenly ca lled th e inhabit an ts of th e western
hem isphere Indian s, he unwittingly had a point : As we now believe .
th ose people - who of co urse are the real America ns - were
descendants of tribes from th e corm nen r he soug ht , on ly they had
emi gra ted to th e Ameri cas via the Bering Straits some 30,000 years
earlier ,
Of th e vari ous cult ures which developed in th e area which today
forms th e Uni ted States , one of th e most distincti ve is th at of th e socalled Pu eblo Ind ians. For a t least 12, 000 years they h ave lived in
more or less th e same locations in the Sou th west, most of them in the
northwestern pa rt of pr esen t -d ay Ne w Mexico .
This is a beautiful but ari d part of th e country . It is filled with
massive mountain ranges, wid e mesas (p lateaus) of solid rock , san d stone cliffs. lavabe ds , and san dy pla ins . and the whole is cut throu gh
by deep canyons and smaller arroyos (ravi nes) . Most of th e few
river beds are dry exce pt during th e seaso n of summer torrents. Even
though no part of th e area is less th an a mil e above sea level, sum mers can be very hot , and winters can be equa lly d estructive with
sno wstorms and ea rly a nd late frosts. The mountain slopes a re here
a nd there forested , an d th e streams a nd creeks are lined with willows
and cotton wood, but for the rest, there is mostl y no thi ng bu t a sparse
vegetat ion of grass and shru bs . Existen ce was precarious already for
th e early inhabita nt s who lived by hunting a nd the g atheri ng of wild
plants. an d in time , th e clim ate becam e even drier. T he people the n
ha d to stay close to wha tever wat er th ey could fin d. an d for the last
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2,000 years those who have lived here have bu ilt villages and grown
com, devising ingenious techniques for making the planu use all
available moisture. No wonder the Pueblo ceremonies are centered
on the need for rain .
Scholars ha ve for some time been aware of the fact that the Pueblo
Indians ha d already reached a high level of civilization in their early
development. As Joe S. Sando states in his book on The Pueblo In dians (p . 208), the period from 1150 to 1:550 A.D, was the "classic" or
"Golden Age" of Pueblo develop ment when an advanced fonn of
government and a form alized religion evolved and when the ora l
tradition reached its full bloom . When the Spani ar ds came in 1540
with the Coronado expedition , they wer e no doubt impressed by the
fact that these tribes were housed in adobe villages {rpueblo" is
Spa nish for village) , tha t they lived not so much on wild game as on
what they got from a highl y organized agriculture (which in addition
to com yielded bea ns and squash, cotton and toba cco), and that they
were peaceful and well governed . Nevertheless, the newcomers could
only see the Pueblos as subjects to be ruled and , perhaps even more
imponant , as "unci vilized heathens" to be won for Christianity; and
"en had the Spaniards wanted to, they would have had a hard time
understa nding the Pueblo culture,
More than half a century ago , non -Indi an anthropologists like
Fra m Boas and Elsie Clew Parsons began to record the myths an d
social organization of the Pueblos, and more recently such Pueblo
scholars as Edward P. Dozier , Alfonso Dmz , Joe S. Sando, and Paula
Gunn Allen have given w insiders' information . M ter Ts'its 'tsi'nako
or Thoughtwoman (in some myths she is identic al with Spiderwoman ) had cr ea ted the cosmos by thinking everything into ellistence, E-yet-e-eo or the Allmother , who is perhaps the central dei ty, together with Badger made a hole in the earth's crust big enough
50 that people could come up to the surfac e from Shibapu , the
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Underworld (one of th e four worlds down there) or Place of
Emergence. After a trek to th e south , th e people settled at their present pueblo locations. E-yet -e-co gave th em her heart in the fonn of
corn and instructed some of them to da nce for rain and others to
help make the maize grow . The Puebl o Indians ca ll th e sun Father ,
while the com , the sky with its rain , and the ea rth with its soil ar e
referred to as Mother . & Ortiz notes (in his New Perspectives on th e
Pueblos, p . 297), "T he sun father and th e earth mother continuously
interact , [, • . and] new individuals ar e 'born' from th e underworld ."
The death of humans is seen as just as na tural as that of plants. and
when people die . they all go back to £ -yet -e -co in th e ea rth ; some of
th em , meanwhile. retu rn to th e villag es in the form of d ouds to act
as Rainmakers .
Sando observes (pp . 17, 22f) that "T he tradition of religious beliefs
permea tes every aspect of th e people's life ; it determ ines man'. rela tion with th e natural world and with his fellow man. Its bas ic con cern is continuity of a harmonious relationship with th e world in
which man lives." The religious practices them selves have remained
un changed for centuries . The Puebl os of today memorize th e same
age -old oratories, prayers, and songs, which are their "re quests for
an orderly life, rain. good crops, plen tiful game. " Apart from this,
th ey do not desire to "de velop " th eir co untry. Their ethos dictates
that the earth should be allowed to recreate wha tever grows on it,
and Ortiz notes that in no tri be has he found anything resem bl ing the
idea of progress.
When the invaders came in stre ngt h and in 1598 made the pueblos
swear allegiance to th e King of Spain , m issionaries were forced on
most of the tribes . The puebl o people were made to worship in the
Catholic way, but th ey managed to keep up their traditional religious
pract ices. and th ough a secular leadership, headed by a governor,
was created for ea ch pueblo, th e old religio us hierarchy remained the
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real power . But the Spanish rule was harsh enough to result in the
Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which some pueblos today commemorate as
the first American Revolution. Thanks to cooperation among the
various tribes , they managed to get rid of the Spaniards and to keep
them away for twelve years, and when the foreigners came back , they
wisely began to rule a little more leniently .
It was in 1706 that the Spaniards founded a mission and built a
church at Laguna, a village situated fifty miles west of Albuquerque
and then having as neighbor a lake ("laguna" is Spanish for shallow
lake) , formed by a small river which the new rulers renamed Rio San
Jose after the patron saint of the pueblo . Together with the in habitants of Acoma (fifteen miles southwest of Laguna) and a few
other pueblos, the Laguna speak the so-called Keresan language.
Old Laguna had been formed a few centuries earlier by peop le
coming from the north, and during the Pueblo Revolt it was
strengthened by immigrants from other pueblos. The Lagunas were
an energetic people who established a number of outlying set tlements. Today there are seven of them : Encinal , Paraje, Seama,
Casa Blanca, New Laguna , Paguate , and Mesita , with a population
of 5,500, of whom 800 live in Old Laguna. They kept large herds of
ca ttle, and they were active in fending off the raids of the nomadic
Navajos and Apaches . The Spaniards and later the Americans took a
major pan of the land the Lagunas considered their own , so that to day only 417,006 acres are included in the tribally owned Laguna
Reservation .
The most important social structure at Laguna is the clan. The
dans are matrilineal , and as noted by Dozier (The Pueblo Indians of
North America , p . 137), the Pueblo women enjoy a high st atus:
besides being responsible for the household , they own the hou se, they
make the important decisions, and especially the oldest in the group
are looked to by all for advice . The men do the farming and are
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responsible for most of the ceremonial activities . Of these , the most
important celebrations are held in connection with Christmas and
New Year's, when they pray for rain , and the name day of the patron
saint (for San Jose , thi s is September 19, Laguna Feast day . when the
Harvest Dance gathers all Laguna Pueblos). The festivities include
Mass in the Catholic church, dances in front of it and in the plaza ,
and a procession with the statue of the saint.
As long as the pueblos had only Catholicism to contend with . they
were able to achieve a fairly comfort able "compartmentalization" (in
the term of Ortiz) of the two religions, but the advent of Protestant
missionaries caused complications . These proselytizers wer e particularly active in Laguna . where for ten years just before the Civil
War. Samuel C . Gorman ran a mission churc h and school for the
Baptists, and from 1875 to 1887 Dr . John Menaul did the same for
the Presbyterians. Meanwhile, just after the war , a number of other
white Protestants arrived who worked as surveyors, married Laguna
women , and settled permanently in the area . The group included
John Gunn and George Pratt , and Walter G. (for Gunn) Marmon. a
Civil War Colonel from Ohio. who came in 1868. bri efly taught
school, and then became a trader there. like his younger brother ,
Robert G. Marmon (Leslie Marmon Silko's great -grandfather), who
came in 1872.
In a report of 1881 to the Presbytery of Santa Fe. Menaul com plained about the "idolatry and heathenism " of these "Indian sun
worshipers" and termed them "rem nants of a nation dying out by
reason of their immoral and debasing customs." But he added that
"the Pueblo Indians ar e, of all people, the most religious ," their
whole inner and outer life being "one of perfect devotion to religious
Custom . or obedience to [their] faith . What a lesson for Christiansl"
He also observed that the Catholics had not really Christianized
them -all they had achieved was that the Lagunas had "received the
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rites of Rom anism as an addition to their own ," Apparently this did
not satisfy him : for him self , he was "looking to the Lord for an abundant harvest of Indian souls," and to be effective, he printed a
Children j Catec hism in Keresan and worked to get young Lagunas
sen t to Indian School at Albuquerque or Carlisle, Pennsylvania .
At about thi s time , the whites got Robert Marmon elected to serve
a year's term as Laguna governor , and through a vote of the peopl e,
many of the old customs were prohibited . Anti -American "conser vatives" now turned against "progressive" adh er ent s of th e new sects ,
and in 1879, the leaders of th e medi cine societies closed th e kivas
(i.e. , th eir religious centers) and moved to Mesita and later to th e Rio
Grande. Silko notes in Storyteller that a good deal of controversy sur rounds the Marm on brothers. Ethnologists blame them for ca using
factions and trouble at Laguna, and tho ugh neither of the brothers
was a practising Presbyterian , Silko believes th at many of th e charges
are true , Yet the exod us from Old Laguna to th e outlying settlements
evidently sta rted before the Marmons arrived , possibly as a result of
th e work of Gorman . A ~ec ade into our cent ury , Laguna censer varives m anaged to re -esta blish some thing of the old religious system,
and Parson 's predic tion that Laguna was a lost cause (she found no
kivas the re) seems to have been ill -founded.
There have been some further notable events in recent Laguna
history. The changes just mentioned also brought with them a new
constitution for the pueblo, largely modeled on th at of the U.S. , and
in part authored by the Marm ons. In the 1880s, the so-called Laguna
Regulars served as Indian Scouts for the fed eral troops looking for
Gero nimo . In the two World Wars , m an y Lagunas eagerl y signed
up . After th e Manhattan Project was sta rted in 1943 at nearby Los
Alamos, ur anium was being mined at well-guarded sites on th e
Laguna Reservation , a nd on Jul y 16, 1945, early-rising Lagunas
th ought the sun had sudden ly risen when they saw what the y later
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learned was th e atomic blast at T rini ty Site 150 miles away.
Today, northwestern New Mex ico is the largest uranium pr oduc ing region in the world ; it ha s the la rgest open pit uranium min e in
existence , th e j ackpile Mine, near Paguate on Laguna land , an d the
deepest uranium min e sha ft , sunk in to Mt. Taylor , a mou nt ain
northwest of Laguna, which is sacred to the Pueblo and Navajo peo ple. Gra nts, a city up stream o n the Rio San Jose where the ur anium is
pr ocessed in milling pl an ts , calls itself "The Ura nium Capital of th e
World ." When th e jackpile Mine was opened in th e 19505, it was op posed by the old er people who felt that Pueblo values are to be found
in areas other than sophisdcated technology, but the min e was
welcom ed by th e young beca use it offered jobs. Today at Laguna
Puebl o, one fourth of the la bor force works a t th e min e. Their pr ogressive trib al govem men r has invested th e consider able royalty from
th e leases or used it to provide jobs and education . At Laguna there
is no unemployment and people are materially fairl y w~1I off , Even
50 , th~ Lagu nas , and the o the r Puebl os , are worried .
On th e one hand , they fear th e day whe,n th eir deposits of uraniu m
ore will be gon~ and they will lose their jobs. On th e other , they now
realiz e the dangen involved in the mining and milling of it . Cancer is
spreading ; th e rate of ch ild re n born with birth defects at Laguna is
alarming ; with mill ta ilings retain ing 85% of the original radioac tivity of th e uranium , th e ecosystem is contamina ted , to th e degree
that the Environm ental Prot ect ion Agency in surveys of d rin king
wat er has found radiation levels 200 times th ose allowed . And it will
prob abl y get worse : the Bureau of Indian M fain, which is still sole
custodian of all Pueblo land, expects th e number of min es in th e area
to be more th an doubled by th e year 2000 .
Life a mong th e Puebl os, too, is changing . T raditionally, th ey have
eco nom ically had a communal system , encouraging cooperation and
gr oup good a nd tonin g down individualism. They lived ~ closely
12
together that it was everybody's business how ot hers were doing , and
problems were dealt with at town meetings. There was lit tle violence
and no need for law enforcement. But twenty years ago Laguna ha d
to introduce tribal police , a nd more recently the y also got a ja il. The
suicide ra te is very high , and violence is increasing . Some of the
young now feel tha t all this may well have been caused in part by the
new ways and that the old peop le were right.
II
Born in 1948, Leslie Marm on lived th rough these developments
from old to new as she grew up at Old Laguna . Her first contact with
the traditional was that her mother , a mixed blood Plains Indian ,
kept her on the customary cradle board until she was a year old . Her
home reflected all her three backgrounds : Laguna , Mexican, and
white. T he family lived in one of the Marmon houses , which were
situated below the village , close to the river. "T hey put us in this
place, " Silko has said ; "I always thought there was somet hing symbolic about that , sort of putting us on the fringe of things" (Sun
Tra cks, Fall 1976, p . 29). T his in -between position was also seen in
such facts as that the fami ly was included in clan activities , but not to
the same extent as full bloods, and that the young Leslie helped out
at ceremonial da nces, but did not dance herself.
With her mother away at work, she saw much of her grandmother
Lillie , who had been a Model A mechanic, and her great grandmother Marie or "A'mooh ," a fu ll blood from Paguate who
had married Robert and become a strong Presbyterian , had gone to
Indian School at Carlisle as soon as her many children were grown,
and who washed her hair in yucca roots and told the child about old
days . Anot her especia lly important influ ence on the young girl was
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her grandfather Hank Marmon's sister -in -law Susie. wife of Walter
K. Mannon . She, too , had been to Ca rlisle where she even went
through college , and Silko describes "Aunt Susie" in Storyteller as a
"brilliant woman , a scholar of her own making who has che rished the
Laguna stories all her life ." Silkc has also said of herself that she
comes from a long line of tough old Laguna ladi es: Aunt Susie is to day 106. In a sense. she tr ained the young girl : she told her a wealth
of th e Laguna stories and helped her to love th em and learn th em .
From her gr ea r-grandmcrher she also learned some Keresan , but
at th e local BIA school she was punished if she used it . At eight , she
got her own horse and began to help gathe r ca ttle a t th e fam ily
ra nch , and at thirteen she began to take part in the deer hunts with
her own rifle. Meanwhile. starting with the fifth grade , she com muted to Albuquerque where she attended Catholic schools.
Wher eas Hank Marmon had been refused admittan ce to a restaurant
in that city, Leslie Marmon did not feel insecure, only a little
stra nge , among th e Anglos at school. After a B.A. in ~gli.sh in 1969
at th e University of New Mexico , she began law school in a program
intended to help Nat ive America ns get their own lawyers . but then
ga ve it up for writing and teaching . In 1974 she published Laguna
Woman, a collection of poems , while several of her prose works were
included in Kenneth Rosen 's The Ma n to Send Ra in Clouds : Con t emporary stovies by American Indians. She taught two yea rs at
Navajo Community College: at T saile. th en spent two years writing
Ceremony, in Ket chikan. Alaska, and then returned to tea ch at her
old university . In 1978 she moved to Tucson , where she is now a professor at the University of Arizona .
Leslie Mannon eagerly absorbed the abundance of stories she
heard from a nwnber of peo ple around her , and she became an avid
reader . At the age of twelve, she particularly liked Poe. Steinb eck,
Faulkner, and Flannery O 'Connor. and at college, Shakespeare and
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Milton . In a sense she start ed to write in the fifth grade: "A teacher
gave us a list of words to ma ke sentences out of, and 1 just made it in to a story automatically" (interview in Dexter Fisher , ed . , The Third
Woman, p . 19). But it was only at college in 1967 when she was
forced to write a story in a c reative writing course and found again
that what was difficult ~or others came naturally to her, that she
realized she was a writer. Back at Laguna she had just hea rd in
headline fonn that an old man had been found dead at a sheep cam p
and had been given a traditional burial and that the prie st had
resented the fact that he was not called in . Unable to think of
an ything else, she decided to writ e about this incident and to tr y to
imagine the scene and how the people had felt. The result was "T he
Man to Send Ra in Clouds ," which was quickly published in New
Mexico Quarterly and also earned for her a "Discovery Grant."
In Rosen 's 1974 anthology, Silko wrote about herself: "I am of
mixed -breed ancestry, but what I know is Laguna . This plac e I am
from is everything I am as a writer and human being." And she has
also said (in Laguna Wom an ): "I suppose at th e core of my writing is
the attempt to identify what it is to be a half-breed or mixed blooded
person ; what it is is gr ow up neither white nor full y traditional In dian ." It is as if she is saying that she is wholly a Laguna Pueb lo and
will write about the place wh ere she grew up , but that at the same
tim e she is a mixed -blood and therefor e has been given the ability
and the freedom to see Laguna also from the outside . Her first story
exem plifies this double vision .
When Ken and Leon in their pick up come looking for old T ecfilo,
they already have with them what is needed to perform the
preliminaries for a traditional burial . such as painting his face .
Whe n they ha ve compl eted these tasks, Leon smiles and says.
"Send us rain douds , Grandfather." Returning to the pueblo with
th e bod y under a tarpaulin , they meet Father Paul , who is led to
15
believe th at Teofilo is alive and well a t camp. La ter at hom e, th e
fun eral is performe d with clanspeople a nd old men with medi cine
bags a ttending . Whil e th e others go to the graveyard , Leon acts upon
Louise's suggestion that he ask the priesc to sprinkle "holy water for
Gra nd pa . So he won 't be th irsty," Fat her Paul protests that a Christia n buri al would require th e Last Rites and a Mass, but in the end
he reluctantly comes along , and whe n the bespri nkled body is
lowered , Leon is happy: "now th e old ma n could send the m big
thunderclouds for sure.,.
Silko's interest in th is story does not lie in the descriptions of t he
ritu als th em selves. She has said that while she has looked at an thropol ogists ' reports on Lagu na , she does not cons ult them. For o ne
thing , she doubts that th e info rmants (among whom were some of
her own ancestors) always gave the scholars the tru e story , an d more
important, their reports are de ad to her compared to the living rea lity of what she has hear d a nd seen and felt herself. Also, she is an a r tist who wants to apply her imagina tion to the telli ng of tales, and to
her, th e essence of rhis particular incident is th e story of th is instance
of cultura l clash with th e feelin gs a nd ideas involved .
To be sure, she does want us to see that th ese ar e Laguna rituals
and attitudes. For exa mple, she gives us such local de tails as tha t Leon
ties a gray feather in Tecfilc 's hair a nd that he paints th e old ma n's
face with stripes of certain colors. But she does not tell us what the
med icine men do at the important event of the funeral in Teofilo's
hom e. Thus we have to guess th at some of the things th ey all do, suc h
as Leon's application of paints, m ay be part of th e task of maki ng
"h im so th at he m ay be recognized " in Shibapu , an d tha t ot hers ,
such as Lou ise's sprinkling of corn m eal and he r concern th at her
Gran dpa shall no t be thirsty, ar e intende d to m ake sure that he has
"water . , , and also food for his tra veling provisions" (Boas, Keresan
Texts, 1928; rpt , New York : AMS Press, 1974, pp . 203 f).
16
What we have in the story are two different ideas of death , or
rather , of our whole existence. The Indian , as Vine Deloria has
rem inded us, is wedded to pla ce rather than time and to group
rather than individ ua l. On the one hand, as Ortiz has writt en , "Indian tradition s exist in , and ar e primarily to be understood in rel ation to , space ; they belong to the pla ce where th e people exist or
originated, " their existence being likened metaphorically to that of a
plant . And he adds: "time in its line ar , histori cal dimension .. , is
unim portant" compared to "cyclical, rhythmi c time, time viewed as
a series of endl essly repeating cycles, on the model of th e seasons or,
aga in , pla nts" (India n Historian , Winter 1977, pp . 18 f) . And on the
other hand , as already suggested , pueblo societies see th e survival of the group as more irnportanr than the existence of the in dividual . That is, man is a minute pa rt of an immense natural cycle,
and his death ha s nothing threatening in it because, after a life which
contained both the good and the bad th at all Pueblos brought with
th em from Shibapu , he simply goes back to where he ca me from , and
in line with the communal thinking , it is hoped that his spirit will
help the group he leaves behind by returning with ra in clouds . This is
of course wholly alien to Catholic th inking , which sees death in terms
of th e individual ra ther than the group and which looks at it as one
sinful mortal's final , critical me eting with his Maker, in which it is
hoped that the blessing symbolized by the holy water will help.
It is part of the mast ery of this short story that Silko only lightl y
suggests all this in her spare, highly contr olled narrative, in which
she hardly enters into th e protagonists' minds. Furthermore, as an
objec tive writ er , she does not take sides, but gives a ba lanced , sen sitive presentation of th e charac ters . In her depiction of the Pueblos
she makes us feel what David B. Espey ha s term ed "the mood of
peace and simplicity , the quiet assurance with which [th ey) react to
death ," accepting from Catholicism only what they can use; and in
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her sympathetic picture of th e p riest we sense both his good will and
his bewilderment. In th e one riddle she leaves us with -Father Paul
is rem inded of som eth ing . but does not know what . when th e water
immed iately disappears int o th e sand -she seems to suggest that he is
on the verge of und erstanding th e impossibility o f Christia nizing th is
proud . independent . "foreign" people who look to Me Taylor . loom ing up beh ind th e gr aveyard , as a holy shri ne and who ha ve
decorated most of the walls of th e ch u rch in which he works with
signs of thunder , clouds , and rainbows. In the quiet d ignity of the
telling of this moving ta le , Silko m akes it clear that she is an in telligent writer and a born storyteller .
Joseph Bruchac reports th at Silko said to h im once , .. 'My writing is
a gift to th e Earth : And she mea nt this with grea t hum ility" (Dick
Lourie , ed ., Com e to Power, p . 6). That is, it is her way of saying
Thank You to th e earth for pr oviding for her and giving her an iden tit y through the place of Laguna with its rich store of n arr ative
material. Using thi s material , she somedmes (as in pa rts of
Storyteller) simply records what she has heard , but mostly she
transforms it th rough her own im agin ation. Clear ly she addresses not
on ly Native Americans, but all readers, and her aim with her writing
seems in part to be the same as with her lectu re in Oslo: " to
famili ari ze th e aud ience with th e origins of contempo rary Ind ian
writing . i .e . • the links in th e ora l trad ition - both th e 'classical' oral
tradition and th e 'cont emporary' ora l tr adition , which con tin ues
even now ." This "sense of con tin u ing - tha t the Native American
com mu nities and the ir arts /religiou s systems continue on ," as she
phrased it, is dem onstrated in he r next important work . "Yellow
Woman ; ' which Martha Foley in clu d ed in her 200 Years of Great
Amen t-an Short Stories, put ou t in 1976 to commemora te th e
Bicentennial .
Yellow Woman. a generic term for m any Laguna heroines, is
18
found in a great number of stori"_While filling her wat er jar at the
river , she is abducted (after first refusing to be taken away because
she does not know what to do with th e jar) by a ka'tslna, a supernatural being who usuall y lives in Mt. T aylor . Eventually she returns
to her husband, in some venions bringing a pair of twins. Silko tells
us that girls meet boyfriends and lovers at the river and that she wed.
to wander around down th ere herself "and try to imagine walking
around the bend and just happeni ng to stum ble upon some beautiful
man . Later on 1 realized that th ese kinds of th ings that I was doing
when 1 was fifteen a re exactly th e kinds of things out of which stories
like the Yellow Wom an story [ca rne]. I fina lly put the two toget her :
the adolescent longings and the old stories , th at plus the stories
a round Laguna at the time abou t peopl e who did , in fact, just in recent times, use th e river as a m eeting place " (Sun Tracks, Fall 1976,
p. 29).
These layers are perfectly fused in this ta le of a nameless fema le
who is th e only one in the pueblo to credit and love her de ad grand father 's stori es abo ut Yellow Woman . Half believing herself to be
such a character when she sleeps at the river with a stranger she
wants to see as a ka'tsina , she goes with him to the mo untains where
he rustles cattle ; when one d ay th ey ar e confronted by a rancher , she
is orde red to go to his ca bin with a beef carcass, but instead she
returns to her husband and child . Bad. in th e puebl o she decides to
tell th em she had been kid napped by a Navajo , at th e same time
regr etting that her grandfa ther is not there to appreciate her story,
and hopi ng the man will come for her again .
As we read th e woman's ta le with its sensuous descripti on of
physical contact, we understand how she is rul ed by an overpowering
sexual attraction a nd why she does not we ea rlier opportunities to
escape, and Silko's artistry lies in the subtlety with which she shows us
how th e woman is confused as she tries to mask and excuse the fact of
19
her adultery by seei ng it thro ugh the haze of th e old story . thereby
lifting a som ewh at everyday occurrence into the realm of the su pernarural , In this warmly vibr ant ta le the author tells us just enough
of the old myth itself so that we ca n follow th e delicate shifts in this
profound psychological study, which constitut es a remark able
achievement in the way it sho ws how th e traditional and th e contem porary can unite into a living reality.
Whil e "Yellow Woman " seems to say th at white influen ce ha s
m ade mo st Pueblos forget th e old m yths . "T he Man to Send Rain
Clouds" indicates that the Lagunas have remained rather
uninfluenced b y Christianity. Before Silko st arted Ceremony, she
wrote som e further notable tales in which she demonstrates other
variations on this theme of Ang lo -Indian int erplay .
"T ony's Story" was also suggested by a local occurrence . Wh en
Leslie Marmon was four , an Acom a man killed a st ate poli ceman .
One d ay at college . she sat d own to writ e abou t th e incident as seen
from Tony's point of view. m aking him commit the murder because
he sees the man as a witch . The story op en s as follo ws: " It h appened
one summer when the sky was wide and hot and th e sum mer rains
did not come; the sheep were thin , and the tu mbleweeds turned
brown and d ied . Leon came back from the army. . . . He grabbed
my hand and held it tight like a white man ."
Here , as so often , Sitko with ease and vigor im med ia tely arouses
our interest. with a few words evoking the scen e and suggesting what
later becomes evident , in this instance that Leon has acquired non In d ian ways, wherea s Tony h as remained fully a traditional Pueblo.
When Leon is spotted drinking out of bounds by a non-Indian state
pol iceman and viciously beaten by him witho ut provocation, he com pla ins to the pueblo meeting and vows he will "kill the big bastard" if
he does it again . Tony, me anwhile , sees th e men back fr om the army
as troublemakers when they stand up for their rights, an d when he
20
ha s a dream with the cop appearing in the form of a traditional
witch, he knows why it ha s come and why they have a drought .
Unlike Leon , he remembers the old stories about witch craft ; usually
provoked when the Pu eblos deviate from the old ways, it manifests
itself through the misu se of pow er , and if necessary , it must be
destroyed .
This is a painfully gr ipping story , partly because we empathize
with the timelessly pe rsecuted Na tive Americans, and partly because
it prepares us step by step for th e ironic conclusion : Leon , the
modern Pueblo who sees the cop as a rep resentative of the whit e op pr essors , does not use the gun ; instead , the shot is fired by the tradi tional T ony , who would not dream of attacking the whites, but who
kno ws he mu st annihilate wh at he sees as a terribly destructive
spiri tua l for ce comi ng o ut of their own Pueblo existence . As his horrified comp an ion watches , Tony comp letes the purifica tion by burning th e bod y in the car . "Don 't worry, everything is O .K . now , Leon .
It's killed ," he says, ad ding, "T hey sometimes take on strange
form s," And he feels that with "it" gone , th e rains can come again ,
" A Geronimo Story " is Silko 's art istic version of the Laguna
Regulars' p art icipation in th e sea rch for the Apache chief. These
men , who included several of her ancestors, join ed in thi s search
because it meant "good money," she h as said , adding th at she would
like to think th at when th ey di d not find Geronim o , it was because
th ey did not want to . In Silko's tale, whic h is told by a boy who ac comp an ies Siteye. his u ncle , th e La gu nas -led by Cap tain
Pra tt -know th at Geron imo ca n not possibly be where th e Fed er al
Major insists he is, an d they tr y to tell him so . But in va in , and the
poi nt of the story is not so much that th e Pueblos (and even the Cap tai n , who is m arried to one) are looked down upon by the whites, but
ra th er th at it is th ey -the Lagunas - who feel su perior. The more
leisurely pa ce of this tale allow s th e author not onl y to show how they
21
make th e trip into an enjo yable ou ting, which for the boy marks a
ste p in his bec om ing a rea l Laguna as he watche s n ature and ea ts
fre sh deer liver , but , equally impo r tan t , to give us many instances of
the subtle Pueblo humor an d ir on y. "Siteye shoo k his head gently "
'You know .' he said , 'th at was a long way to go for deer h unting .' "
In " Lullaby, " a story which Martha Foley included in T h e B est
American Short Stories of 1975, Silko moves closer to our times ,
focusing on an old Navajo cou p le living j ust no rth of Laguna Reser vation . "T he sun h ad gone do wn , but the snow in the wind ga ve off
its own light. It came in thick tu fts like new wool - washe d before the
weaver spins it. Ayah reached out for it like her own bab ies h ad , and
she smiled when she rem embered how she ha d laughed at th em ." In
thi s opening , the author suggests how Ayah , sitt ing against a tree
waiting for Chato to come b ack from Azaie's Bar aft er h aving spe nt
most of the monthly government chec k, is thinking of the two rea lly
important ele ments in her life : her ch ild hood in the hog an with her
mother wea ving , and her two sm all ch ild ren whom th e white do ctors
had come for and "weaned from these la va hills an d from thi s sky" so
that , already at their second visit ba ck home, they hardly recogni zed
he r.
Even though th e story is seen through Ayah 's eyes and painfully illustrates her loss, it doe s not condemn the whit es, but pr esen ts a
balanced picture . T o be sure , we see ex am ples of bow th e Navajos
are sha bb ily treated , but when the do cto rs come for the child ren , it is
to save them from the tuberculosis which h as killed their sib lings,
and when Ayah signs the p apers, it is because Chato ha s ta ught her
to sign h er name , but not to understand Engli sh . Wh en she realizes
what she ha s done and wan ts to ca ll in a medicine man , Chato tells
her it is too late, and from then on she no longer sleeps at h is side ,
thinking of how "the old ones always told her abou t lea rning th eir
language or any of their ways: it endangered you , " and hating him
22
for introducing her to the new. T he author effec tively suggests th is
gap by having Ayah sit u nder her dead son's tattered army bl anket
an d think of her mo ther's warm, be aut iful Nav ajo rugs .
This deepl y mo ving story ends wit h Ayah letting the d ecr ep it and
senile Chato sleep in the snow , knowing "He would not feel it ." O ver whelmed by a "rush so big inside her heart for th e ba bies," she sings
the lullaby which h er grandmo ther had sung for her : "T he earth is
you r mother , / she ho lds you . I The Sky is your fa ther , / he p rotects
you . / . . . I We are togeth er always I We are together always I
There never was a tim e I wher e this I was not so." Wh ile min istering
over the (in one sense) m erciful en d of her husb an d , she is thus sing ing a song for babies, thereb y joining death and life , suggesting th a t
tim e is one an d en dless , and th at life , when roo ted in the familiar
soil, is perp et ual.
All the storie s dealt with above are ou tstand ing . It is not surp rising
th a t this little bod y of works soon established Silko as an
important writer. Some of these stories -especia lly " Lullaby" an d
"T he Man to Send Rain Clouds" - m ay well become classics in
Ame rican literatur e .
Whi le still at Chin le , Silko wrote a p iece "done for an ti-Nixo n
people, of ab out 50 pages, a imed at sixth graders , abo ut youn g peo ple being against strip mining. relocated at J eme z Pueblo ." (Here ,
and in othe r passages th at give Silko's views, I am referring to wha t
she h as told me in conversa tion .) All she wished to publish from this
"Hum aweep i, the Wa rrior Priest " is fou nd in Rosen 's ant hology ,
which gives us Hum aweepi sp eaking a t two stages in h is life . Aged
nineteen in the fir st excer p t , he ha s lived half his life outside the
pueblo with his u ncle , a medicin e man . and h as been
traine d -throug h the old man's way of life a nd his stories (ra ther
tha n th rough magic) - in what A . La v on ne Ru off calls "the gradual
process of becomi ng on e with n atu re ," with th e result th at he is n ow
23
ready fOT the- fina l ini tiation . Once- thi s is completed . he , in tu m , is
able to tr ansm it th e wisdom of his pu e-blo's religion to the nex t
genera tion, wh ich is what he seems to be do ing in the-second e-xce-rpt.
When Silko in th e unpu blished p arts has "the pr otagonist saying :
'If you dyna mi te th e steamshovel , it won 't he lp you ,' .. it suggests th at
wh at she- wanted to say to the young rea ders was , on th e one han d ,
th at the white- civilization cannot be- stopped , an d on the other , th a t
just beca use of th is, the- continuation of th e ora l trad ition is more impo rta nt tha n ever .
Anoth er th ing Silko did befo re sta rt ing on Ceremony was to write a
" Fore-word " to Bord er T owns of th e Navajo Nation , a book of dr aw ings by Aaron Yava , mostl y de p icting dr unks on the streets of
Ga lJup, the " In dian Ca p ital, " 150 mi les west of Albu querque . Here
she wri tes: 1 "saw some of these same scenes with my own relarivea,
and it still hu rts me- when I look a t Aaron 's drawings." She can
und erstan d , she says, that many people are- shoc ked by them , but
adds th at "Aaron a nd I care as much as any Ind ian people , abou t the
'Ind ian self·image' an d 'Indian Prid e .' But we have been ta ught to
value tr uth above all else ; and th ese scenes are true , and they must
not be hidden . To h ide them , is in a sense, den ying th at th ese Indian
people- exist , denying that ou r cousin s an d uncles exist because th ey
could be my cousins an d u ncles . Den ial of ou rselves and our own
origins is one of th e most devastati ng psychological weapons th e
Wh ites ha ve- e-ve-r foun d to use- against us ."
Silko con rin ues: " I th in k Aaron says wit h h is dr awings what I at tempt to say with my stories - th at Indian life- tod ay is full of terro r
and de-ath a nd great suffering , bu t de-spite- th ese treme ndous od ds
against us for two hundr ed of years - t he racism, the po verty , the
alco ho lism - we go on living . We live- to celebrate the beau ty of the
Ea rth and Sky because the beauty a nd vitality of life , like th e rain bow colored horses leaping , h as neve r been lost. T he world remains
24
for us as it h as always been . O ne with itself an d us. death an d
lau ghter existing side by side as it does in Aar on 's dr awings. . . .
Aa ron 's vision comes down to h im fro m the old ones who knew n o
boundaries between man an d the Earth , between th e beautiful and
th e ug ly. T hey kn ew on ly the truth ."
As we see in "Humaweepi" and th is " Foreword, " there is no question th a t Silko is involved and feels de ep ly abou t these matt ers . Yet
she ha s wri tte n few furt her suc h items . " I am po litica l , but 1 am
pol itical in my stories," she has sta ted ( T he T hird Wo man , p . 22) .
And , as ca nnot su rprise us in t his intelligent . balanced writer , she
wan ts sub tlety : "I am bored with the oversimp lificati on ," she h as said
in con nection with some writi ngs abo ut Na tive Americans , and sh e
feels that "wri ting a story like ' Lu llaby' [is more effective ] th an to
rant and rave ." When she is eager to have h er writ ings published ,
one reason is undou bted ly that she feels she has somet hing to say.
and on th e b asis of the two p ieces above . we can sum up her basic
id eas or concerns as of 1973 - the year she started Cerem ony - in th is
way: It is import ant to Native America ns that they keep open all life lines to th eir roots; by b uild ing on th e strength con tained in th eir
tr adi tions and in th eir closen ess to nature , the y are better prepared
to withstand the white infl uen ce an d to find th e strength to face the
realities of thei r existence in modern , Anglo Ame rica .
III
Silko ha s said that in Alaska , fa r away from her own Sou th west ,
she was depressed , and th at for a time , writing was thera py for her . a
way to stay sane with "the one thing that 1 ha d that was like a
familiar friend " ( Persona, 1980, p . 31). One da y she sta rted a sho rt
story which in tim e grew into Ceremony , a boo k abo ut a Laguna
25
World War II vete ra n 's quest for san ity, and she makes him achieve
it through reopening the- lifeline to the constructi ve ele-men ts in his
roots.
When the book was published , the dustja cket was provided with
th is sta teme n t by Silko : "T h is novel is essentially abo ut the powen ln .
herent in the process of storytelling . . . , The ch an ting or telling of
a nci en t sto ries to effect certain cures or p rot ect from illness and harm
h ave always been p art of the Pueblo's curing ceremon ies. I feel th e
pow er th at the stories still have to bring us together , especi ally whe n
there is loss a nd grief. My book tells th e sto ry of an In dian fa mi ly, b ut
it is also involved wit h th e sea rch for a ceremony to deal with despair ,
the most virule nt of all diseases - th e de spair which accounts for thesuicide, th e alc oholism, and t he violence which occ ur in so many Ind ia n communities today."
These dark aspe cts of mod ern Ind ian life are cenainl y seen in this
book , espec ially in the yo unger reservation people who are most ex '
posed to th e outs ide in fluence. Silko d oes not softe n the bitte rn ess
th ey feel at havi ng bee n rob bed by th e whi tes of th eir larid and at be ing tr eated in gene ral as second -class citizens, and she makes us very
much aware of the suffering am ong Navajos a nd ot her Ind ians who
end u p as alcoholics or pr ost itutes in th e bars an d b ack alleys of
Gallu p .
Worst off in a sense are those who for a time h ad been in a way ln regrated int o th e- m ain society, th e veterans who h ad bee n pr aised as
patriotic America ns, on ly to be de moted to their pr evious stat us .
Trying to d rown th eir b ittern ess, they use thei r disab ilit y checks to
get drunk in th e bars just ou tside the reservation line on Rou te 66.
Harley, Leroy, a nd £rn o - all with Pu rpl e Hearts from Wake
Island - sit in Dixie Tavern , br aggi ng of the white wome n they h ad
had ; telling th emselves that they h ad been the- best sold iers in the US
Army, th ey curse th e Anglos who se wa r t he-y had fou ght a nd who had
26
"taken everythi ng, " while acting out this rage in violence among
th em selves.
Wh en Tayo , the main character, is also filled with despair , the
reaso n is not so mu ch that he h ates the whites as tha t he cannot ac cept himself. Born of an un known white fath er and a mo ther wit h
whom he had lived for some years among the Gallu p prostitu tes , he
h ad been given by her to her sister in La guna, and she had m ade it
clea r to him that h is mo ther's light footedness was a disgrace to th e
fami ly and that he is inferior to her son Rocky. Au ntie encourages
Rocky's plans to become a footba ll star in the white world. whereas
Tayo's d uty is to h elp his u ncle Josiah wit h h is cattle .
However, flatt ered when Rocky ca lls him "b rother" and wan ts h im
with him in the Anny, he en lists, too , whereupon Au ntie gives him
the task of looking after his cousin . But he cannot prevent Rocky from
bei ng killed beside him in the Pacific , and whe n they are ordered to
fire on some Jap anese p risoners, he believes that one of them is Josiah
and that he is respon sible for his death as well , even though he did
no t p ull the trigger . This extreme self-condem nation causes h im to
break down, and during a long stay in a veterans ' hospital he sur vived by withdrawing from him self into wh at he believes is invisib ility. Fina lly returning to h is pueblo after six years , he b lames himself
for having survived . and also for the d rou gh t which h as plagu ed
Lagun a sinc e h is uncle died a nd for the loss of the ca ttle whic h h ad
run away . No longer caring whe th er he lives or dies , he one day nea r ly kills Erne. Wh en th e Lagu n a medicine man Ku 'oosh , called in by
old Grandma , unsuccessfull y has given h im the Scalp Ce remo ny , he
is sent on to another medicine m an . the Navajo Beton ie who lives
near Ga llu p .
T he posi tion of a medicine man is a very respec ted one . As Gea ry
Hob son no tes (The Remembered Earth , p . 108), not only doe s it ta ke
decades to become a medic ine maker , b ut " He or she m ust have con 27
finn atio n of the com m uni ty. a great sense of the comm uni ty. a pro ·
found knowledge of ani mals a nd pl ants. a knowledge of p ain a nd
sc fferi ng , and a sense of po w('r that can be found o nly in ad herence
to the old things ." while trad it ion is importan t . th is d O('S no t mean
tha t the m edicine of. for ex am ple. the Navajo hol y men is c ne and
static : at Ch inle. Silko found that it is manifold and d eveloping . She
reflec ts th is in Betonie, who is even m or e "progressive" th an o thers in
th at . having traveled and go n(' to school in the wh ite world . he ad j wts to the ch anges around h im and kee ps sam p les of white cult u re
in his hogan alongs id e the traditio na l paraphernalia .
G iven the fact that in Native Am erican thought . the natu ral sta te
of existence is seen as who le . we can understand th at , as Allen ha s
remind ed us (Lit erature of the American Indians, p . 117) "healing
cha nts and ceremonies em p ha size resto ra tion of wholeness, for
disease is a co n d itio n of div ision and sep ara tion from th e harmony of
the whole. Beauty is who leness. Healt h is wholeness. Goodness is
wholeness . A witch - a pe rson who uses the powers of the u niverse in
a (K'fVerse or inh a nnonious way -is called a tw o -hearts : one who is
no t whol e but sp lit in two a t the center of being ." No wond er that the
ci rcle or the hoop is an impo rt ant symbo l with Ind ia ns .
While Betonie does give Tayo traditional cere monies . he wins h is
co nfidence by en co uraging h im to speak of his Pa cific experie nces ,
suggesting that the reason he saw J osiah in one o f the j apanese was
that ~O .OOO ye ars ago they were no stra ngers . Tayo also ta lks about
the fa ct of his o rigi n . wh ich Bet onie ca n sym pathize with since he is a
mixed breed himself. What he is gi ving Tayo is less a cu re t han a
recipe for a self-cure: while the white doctors' medicine had d rai ned
memory ou t o f him , Betcnie tells h im to accept the fact that things
are com plicated and look int o him self a nd remember every thi ng .
T h is approach to healing does no t im ply a modern em phasis on
the in di vid u al, however : "T he re was someth ing large a nd terrifying
28
in the old man's wor ds . H~ wanted to y~1I at the m edi cin e m an, to
yell the things th e whi te doc tors had yelled at him - th at he had to
th in k only of himself, and not about the others, that he would neve r
ge t well as he used word s like 'w~' and 'us.' BUI he had known rhe
answer a ll along, even wh i l~ the white doctors were t~lIing him he
co uld g~ t ....ell and he was tr ying to believe th em : m edicine didn't
work that way, because the world d id n 't work that way . H is sickness
was only part of somerbi ng la rge r, and his cure would be found only
in someth ing great and in clusive o f ev~ryt hi ng" (p . 1 ~ 2 , Signet edi tion).
T his means that he is beginning 10 grasp what Betonie is sug ·
gesting to him : that he is p art of an unend ing histo ry , of a p ueblo
com m un ity now in fluenced by another, grea ter com m unity, of a set
of constru ctive and destructive forces. an d that in ord er to ac hieve
who lene ss, he has to accept the fa ct that th ings are com p lex a nd not
sta tic . As Beto nie says, "T h ere are bala nces and harm onics always
shifting , alwa ys nec~ary to ma int a in . . .. It is a m att er of rran sit ions, you 5«: the changi ng , t he becom ing must be ca red fo r close ly.
You would do as much fo r the seedlings as they become pla n ts in the
f ield" (p. 137).
~ton ie also says tha t in order to achieve a b alance the Indians
sho uld not look upo n th e mselves as helpless, blam ing all wit ·
chery - the dest ructi ve fo rces -on the whites : .. 'Nothing is th a t sim p ie : he said , 'you don 't write off all the white people, just like you
do n 't trust all the Indians' " (p . 1 ~ 5 ) . And to bring home to him the
id ea that th ey can master their own fates a nd "deal with wh ite peo .
pie, with their machines and rbeir beliefs" {p . 1~ 9) , he p resen ts Tayo
with a serio-c omic story or c hant rda ti ng ho w Ihe Ind ians had in vented the whi tes. W hile mo st of the m any othe r in terspersed m ythi c
ch a nts a re Lagun a origin als , this one is more or less m ade up by
Silko . with this song Betonie sends Tayo on his way to look for the
29
cattle, Idling h im 10 keep in m ind th e cc nstella tic n of th e slars wh ich
had appeared in a sa nd p ain tlng made for him .
Tayo's search for the ca ttle is a way of showing h is worth by rep aying Josia h , a nd the enco un ters it leads h im to with a woman and a
mo un tain bo th mark steps in his cu re . The meet ing with T a'eh is
mean ingful not on ly because she loves him , bUI especially beca use he
is a ble to love her , He who had been kep t at a distan ce b y Aun tie an d
who believed it had to be th at way, now experie nc es a wann , almost
wordless c10senns which ope ns him emotionally and m akes him
real ize th aI he was indeed loved b y h is moth er and uncle , jusl as he
loves tbe m . W hen Tayo later meets T s'e h at th e spring , she leads him
further towards the natural when she shows him the marvels of things
that grow ,
Tayo's en counters with T e'eh (a nd he r com pa nion , the hunter] a re
both rea l and unreal. There is a d reamlike quality abou t th eir tender
meetings : she seems 10 kno w a bout him with out asking : she has the
paraphernalia of a med icin e woman : a nd in short, she has many of
the qualities of Sp ide rwoma n , th e MOlher who a lso crea ted th e lan d .
When Ihey make love at th e spring she seems to be me rged with it :
"he felt her bod y, a nd it was warm as th e san d, a nd he could n' t feel
where her body ended and the sa nd began" (p . 232 ).
This re -opening of Tayo's Iifdi ne to n atur e is fu rther ad vanced on
Pa'r o'ch , th e high mesa whe re he fin ally finds rhe ca n le. When his
horse stu mbles and he lies on the grou nd, he knows th aI "t he dark
ea rth loved him " and th at it is up 10 him to joi n it : 'The ~agnetism
of th e center sp read over him . . . . It was pulling him b ack , close 10
the earth , . . . and ~ with the noise and pa in in his hea d he knew
how it would be: a returning rather dun a sepa ration" (pp. 210 f). The
mo untain becomes a metaphor fo r love an d also fo r the la nd . Wh en
T s'e h loo ks at Pa 'tc 'cb , Tayo "cou ld feel where she h ad come from ,
a nd he underst ood where she wo uld always be" (p . 24 1).
'0
After the final encou nter with Ts'eh , Tayo knows he h as to enter
the normal world . He is aware that his friends a re after him (t hey
can not accept a half-breed who will not joi n in their self -deceiving
bragging), a nd he realiz es he ha s to face them . Befor e doing so, he
wat ches the su nrise at Enchanted Mesa , the famo us landm ar k be tween Acoma and Laguna : "All things seemed to converge there :
roads and wagon trails, ca nyons with springs, cliff paintings and
shrines, the memory of Josiah with his cattle; , . . it was all so
beau tiful , ever yth ing , from all directions, even ly pe rfectly , balancing
d ay with night , summer mon ths with winter . The valley was enclosing this totality, like the mind holding all thoughts together in a
sing le moment. The strength came from here , from thi s feeling . It
had always been there" (p p. 248 f).
Given the fact of Sitko's extensive use of Pueblo myths, including
th e one of Crea tion, one might guess that when it is Enchanted Mesa
she lets Tayo see as a cent er where all th ings converge , this is related
to the nea r-religio us sign ifica nce of this gigantic ro ck and the mean ing of its Keresan name [Katsi'ma ], which is "he who stands in the
door" (John M. Gunn, Schat -Chen , p . 17): she may well see this door
as the one leading from our fifth world to the world s of origin below .
In any case, there is a remarkable juxtaposition in th e book of this
Pueblo sanctuary (and th at of Mt. Taylor) and the openi ng -place for
the white man 's new technological era , Trinity Site, with its Christian
connotations.
In deed , as can hardly surprise, cen tral in the no vel is the opposi tion between traditional Pu eblo ways and beliefs and those of Ch ristianity , or rather, the in fluence of th e new on the old . While the an cients "h ad known , with the simple cert ainty of the world they saw,
how everything sh ou ld be, " the world h ad become entangled with the
ad vent of the Eur opeans. "Ch ristianity separated the people from
themselves; it tried to cr ush th e single clan name , encouraging ea ch
'1
pe rso n to stand alone , because Jesus Ch rist wou ld save only the in div idual soul ; Jesu s Christ was not like the Moth er who loved an d
ca red for th em as her child ren, as her fam ily" (p . 70 ). The clear est
example here is Auntie , a "devout Chri sti an " who wa nts to prove
tha t , "a bove all else, she was a Ch ristian woman" (pp . 3 1 and 80) ;
that is, because she is ru led by narrow Christian moral norms, she is
in ordinately u pset by the d isgrace reflect ed u pon her by her relatives
and forgets the da n idea of keeping the gTOup together and helping
everyone .
It is sign ifica nt t hat Au nt ie (in con nec tion with Rock y) thinks in
te rms of "success" (p. 53) . a co ncept which foc uses on what is hap pening to the world of the Pu eb los: wherea s thei r emphasis had bee n
on culti vation a nd conserva tion . on m akin g things grow. the
whites -ruled b y th eir ideas of "progress" and "developmem'tc- ca r Tied out an exploita tion of the land and its resou rces. leaving dumps
behin d them whe n other pla ces became m or e profitable .
T h is d evelopment is also upsetting for the whites : if witches a re
defi ned as destroy ers and witchery as de - rather than con- struc tive
forces . then the whi tes certa inly demonstrate suc h powers , to the
po int tha t they can now destroy the world . Silko's em phas is. however ,
is m ore on what they a re doing to th e Pueb los: som e blame the
Anglos for their ills. and others blame themselves for not bei ng
whi tes , and in bot h insta n ces . it leads to di ssatisfac tion a nd isolation .
also among th e Ind ians them selves . Anot her fact is also crucia l to the
author : Pueblos shoul d remember that at th e emerge nce from
Sh ibapu. all were given both positive a nd negative qua liti es . T hat is .
there is some good in the whi te s and som e bad in themselves . In other
words . the y sho uld return to the bal anced views they have always
had . a nd in ge neral re me m be r all their old wisdom. wh ich also incl ud ed the knowledge th at as things grow. they also ch ange . In thi s
way , they can reg ain the old wholeness and "the feeling peop le have
for each other" (p . 240) and get rid of some of the witches , at least
those now int end ing to kill Tayo.
When h is frie nd s have taken h im to an ab an doned uranium mine ,
he man ages to hide behind some boulders, but when they torture the
one he though t was his real friend , he is tempted to come forward
and attack the m. J ust in time he recalls T s'eh's warning that
"they" - p resum ably all not possessing Pueblo wisdom -c- wan t to end
his story , and he ha s th e strength no t to join in this Indian selfdestruction . He ha s reached the end of his ceremony, and he can tell
the holy men in the kiva what he ha s learned ; "He cried the relief he
felt at finally seeing the pattern , th e way all th e stori es fit
together -the old stories, th e war stories, their stories -to become
th e story that was still being told , He was not crazy; he had never
been cra zy, He h ad only seen and heard the world as it always was;
no boundaries , on ly transitions th rough all distances and time " (p .
258).
The last to spe ak in the book is old Grandma ; " ' I guess I must be
getting old , ' sh e said , 'because these goi ngs-on around Laguna don't
get me excited any more . . . It seems like I already heard these
stor ies before ... only th ing is, the names soun d d ifferent' '' (p . 273).
This passage suggests the author's rationale for including the m an y
myths in the book. The old stories cont a in the truth , the old verities
about universal emotions and experiences. In other word s, the
message to all of us is that there are no boundaries, in the sense that
life is repetition of what h as gone before. Furthermore , you should
treasure the store of traditional ma terial h anded down to you , partly
because it is an in tegral element of your identity , pa rtly bec ause it
ties you more intimately to the la nd that is yours. In th is sense, stories
ins ure survival.
Ceremon y , then , is a very ambitious book : like th e 4, OOO-year-old
Gilgamesh or the Biblical myths, it in a sense wants to cover all men
and aU time. It is very rich in themes an d imagery . It is comp licatd in
that the author re pe ated ly goes b ack and forth in time. She also sp lits
up some of the stories , espe cia lly the cent ra l myth of the Ck'c'yo
medicin e man . At th e same tim e , spread over the wh ole book, this
myth of a witch foolin g with magic sign ifica n tly contri b utes to th e
struct ure of th e novel , just as it perfectl y suggests an important
theme : looking a t this newcomer's tric ks, the locals become "so bu sy
/ playing around with th at / Ck 'o'yo magi c / th ey neglected th e
mother corn altar ," with the result that "O ur mother / Nau'ts'ity'i /
was very angry" and "took the / raindouds with her" (pp . 49 f). At th e
en d of the no vel, Tayo h as learned en ough about nuclear tricks to
know that his road is to go and gather po llen, the source of g rowth .
Not everyth ing is eq ually good in th e book , but th is was perhaps
ine vitable in suc h a com plex firs t novel. Occasion ally there a re
pa ssages or scenes which seem con trived , an d in certain desc ri ptio ns
of what the whites h ave done , Silko's expression comes closer to that
of the activist than we would expect . But on the whole , it is a very
suc cessful book. In most cases her ch ara cterizations are excellen t ,
and she is just as good with m en as with wom en . She is a master in
evoking th e landscape and describing an ima ls. In most pa n s of th e
no vel there is an impressive verve and drive. She clearly masters the
old lore an d interweaves it very effect ively with the main story. As
Robert Sayre has said (ASAIL Neuisieuer, Spring 1978 , p . 12), to th e
three elements of the Indian expe rience - myth , histo ry, an d
realism - Silko h as add ed th e "world of romance , ... the necessa ry
fourth world where the othe r th ree co uld be mi xed and tr ansfigu red ,
transcended ," showing "a willingness to accep t it , no t as real but as a
unifying ideal. " In sum, the book is a remarkable achievement .
IV
While in Alaska, Silko wrote a tale she called "Storyt eller ." a name
she has now also used for her forth coming book , which con tains
nearly all her short fiction , and also most of her poems. When th e
manuscript was comp leted, she said : "I see Storyteller as a statement
about storytelling and th e relationship of the people , m y family and
my background to th e story telling -a pe rsonal sta tement done in the
style of the storytellin g trad ition , i. e . , using storie s themselves to ex plain th e dimensions of th e process."
When she here uses th e words "p erso nal" and "fami ly," we might
perhaps expect the book to resemble N. Scott Mcmaday's Th e
Names, which is a very personal memoir focu sing on the author
himself and h is famil y. There are indeed certain similari ties: like
him , she includes photogr aphs of family scenes, an d also descriptions
of her ancestors. However , th e ph otographs, as she says in the
m an uscript , "are here beca use they are p art of many of the stori es,"
and the info rmation on fam ily members comes in th e form of brief
vignettes given not for themselves, but to introduce or tie toge ther
the poems and tales; th is is what she does, for exam ple , when she lets
the title story be preceded by a description of how her gr andfather
Hank had experienced discr im ination , on e of th e th em es found in
that tal e .
Largely leaving hersel f out of the book , Sitko concen trates on the
functi on of th e oral tradition in her pueblo . Dedicating it to "the
sto rytellers / as far ba ck as memory goes and to th e telling / which
continues and through which they all live / and we with them ," she
pa ys tribute to Aunt Susie , one of the last Laguna Pueblos to pass
"down an en tire culture / by word of mouth / an entire history / an
en tire vision of the world ," one of "the tellers who had / in all the
pa st gen erations / told th e children / an en tire cult ure , an entire
ide n tity of a p eopl e." And she adds : " I remember on ly small parts
here and there . / But thi s is wh at I remember ."
Sto rytelling , thus, is essent ial to th e Pueblos: it anchors them in
35
their m ythical and historical past as well as thei r prese nt; it gives
th em an identity - they know who th ey are and can be prou d of it ;
and besides conveying a sum of knowledge abo ut the land and about
animals, it gives essential wisdom concerni ng human quali ties and
conditions.
We find Silko goi ng far ba ck in time in "Prayer to the Pacific,"
whic h is based on a story from Aunt Susie: standing on the shore,
"swallowing ra indrops I clear from China ," the speaker thinks of
how "T hirty thousand yean ago I Ind ians came riding across th e
ocea n I carried by giant sea turtles." And she combi nes this old voice
with those of history and the presen t when in a seque nce of further
items she first speaks of climbing a mountain, sme lling "the wind for
my ancestors" and looking for th e place where she "descended I a
thousan d yean ago : ' and th en gives us Laguna experiences with the
Navajo in bot h her own time and that of her grandparents .
Ther e are many a nimals in the boo k. We find a story about a goat
as well as poems about hones . T he author lets us sense the tenderness
which both hunter a nd prey fed for each ot her at deerhu nting, and
she shows us how a young boy joins th e bean in the canyon . The
a nimals have the right of the lan d : "wa tch out I don't step on the
spo tted yellow sna ke I he lives here. I T he mount ain is his."
"Yellow Woman" is of course included , in the version mentioned
ea rlier and in several others . We have the t raditional one of
Kochi nin ako -Yellow Wom an ha ving a tryst with Sun Man : " It was
under th e cotto nwood tr ee I in a sandy wash of th e big ca nyon I
under th e tree you ca n find I even now I amo ng all th e others I this
tree I where she came to wait for him . I 'You will know,' I he said I
'you will know by the colon .' " T here is also th e version where she
ru ns away with Buffalo Man , whereupon Ishtoyehm uu t·Arrowboy
comes for her and kills her , too, when he lea rns she would rat her
have stayed with th e seduce r. To sho w tha t th e tr adition lives, the
s.
au thor adds cu rren t stories, for ins tance on e about a man who is
caught in th e act and laughed at : "They were talking now I what a
fool he was I because that woman had a younger boyfriend I and it
was only afte rnoons th at she .. , ."
The book also contains witch stories, those fou nd in C~r~monJ a nd
others. Cen tral among th em is the classical on e of Estoyehmuut a nd
th e- Kunideeyah . or Arr owbo y a nd the Destroyers . In th is fascinating
story, Estoyehmuut learns how Kochinakoa leaves h im at nigh t for
meetings of the Kunideeyah witches where-they assume animal forms
and pla n thei r misd e-eds . Eve-n though Grandmothe-r Splderwoman
helps him , he is left to d ie on a cliff , but he is saved by Grandmothe r
Squirrel who pl ants four pinon seed s so that after four da ys he can
climb down , and after fou r more days Spiderwoman give'S him themeans to kill his wife . Adding not es o n local presum ed sorce ry, Silko
throws fu rther light on th e sign ifica nce of this witch motif.
Among t he animals, coyote is in many ways the one closest to us.
This tri ckster is found in end less stories, an archetypal figure ex emplifying h um an slyness a nd stupid ity. In "Coyotes a nd the
Str o 'ro'ka Dancers ," Silko gives us a story which is found in simila r
form around the world : from th e rim of the mesa , th e- coyotes set'
dance-rs below who ha ve b rought te mp ting food, and the lead er says :
" If we j ust bite l one an oth er's tail I a nd in that wa y I well go down
I in a long string ." But, smelling a fart , one- o f th e-m opens his
mouth , .and th ey all fall down and d ie. T o th is deli ghtful tale, th eauthor adds h er excellent p<l('m "T oe'osh : A Laguna Coyot e- Story ,"
in which she shows how coyOte- is modem man: "O ne year I the
politicians got fan cy I at Laguna . I They went d oor to door with
hams and turkeys I and th ey g ave th e-m to anyone- who p romi sed I to
vote for them . I On election da y all the people I stayed home and at e
turkey I an d lau ghed ." Silko's m ost recent story, "Coyote Holds a
Full House in His Ha nd ," is a fu rt he r vivid illustr ati on of thi s engag ·
ing figure.
The titl e story in this book , th e first in which th e author steps out side th e Pueblo ar ea , is in many respec ts th e most important in th e
volume . Set in Inuit country on th e Kuskokwim River in Alaska, near
Bethel where Sitko spent a month , it tells of three Eskimos living in a
shack, an old couple and a girl. When the old woma n dies, th e
younger one has sex with Gussuclts (whites) in the village where the
oildri llers live, and one day she tempts the sroreman . who had been
responsible for her parems' death but never taken to court, to run
after her to the river where she leu him drown .
This rich and com pac t tal e shows certa in simila rities with some of
Silko's previous ones : th ere is an in effectual priest as in "T he Man to
Send Ra in Clouds"; the protagon ist has somethi ng of Yellow Woman
an d also of sm an Coyote; and th er e is th e same painful , moving
treatment of discrimination and loss as in "Tony's Story" and
" Lulla by." In th e context of Storyteller , however, the central
achi evem ent of thi s outstanding t ale is how it explains "the di mensions of th e process: ' as the author said .
The Cussucks had believed th e sto reman 's lies, a nd th e old
woman's "joi nts ar e swollen with anger ." The old m an , meanwhile,
"ta lked all wint er, softly and incessantly about th e giant polar bear
stalking a lone m an across Berin g Sea ice." Lat er , the wom an 's spirit
speaks to he r: .. 'It will take a long time, but th e story m ust be told .
Ther e must not be any lies.' ... She th ought he r gr andmother was
talking about the old m an 's bea r story ; she did not know about the
othe r story th en ." This ot her story is the one she is to act out . Reared
on th e ora l tra diti on , convinced of the truth an d importan ce of th e
tales , she lives out the story she crea tes, she is her story, and in this
way he r life becomes inext ricably linked with storytelling .
With th is book, Silko accom plishes severa l things: she performs a n
invaluable service in preserving these versions of some of th e oral
material handed down to her ; she sho ws us how stories are life and
life is sto ries ; and she makes evid ent th e fact that the story telling
tradi tion is indeed alive . As she has said (Sun Tra cks, Fall 1976 , P:
33), "we're going stronge r th an ever ." Her book is not onl y a telling ,
but also a highly satisfying, d emonstration of th is.
v
When Silko once said that her a im is to be a good storyteller , she
signi fica ntly added : " Implicit in that is the whole idea that all of my
heritage , my ba ckground , was gathered, is a part of being a
story teller. " Having long been interested in film -making , she is now
also using th at medium to give exp ression to this heritage . With NE H
funding , she is -with Den nis W . Carr - presen tly making th e first in
a series of four videotapes, each to be given to a Laguna oral n ar rative (t'Esroy-eh- Muur and th e Ku nid eeyahs ," "Coyote ," "Yellow
Woman ," and "Creation"), with the texts written and read by her . In
h er view, color video ca n provide "the 'feeling ' and the sense of th e
pl ace ," "the 'con text ' or 'p laci ng' of these stories which are, after all ,
so much identified with specific locations around th e pueblo ."
Again we see how important the sense of the place is to Silko . We
are reminded of the fact that in m od em history, the Pueblos were
one of the few gr oups of Indians who were able to stay with their
land . Can the whites ever really understand how the Indians view
time as not lin ear an d how they feel that they "belong to the land,
th at the earth po ssesses" th em ? In a review of Dee Brown's Greek
Ma ry's Blood , a novel dealing with th e recent history of the Creek
tribe, Silko doe s not say that they can't , but she finds that while this
book "attemp ts to evoke what th e Indian people felt for the land , .. .
no attention is paid to [this] powerful kinship ," an d she regrets that
39
"the reader is led to believe that th e Indian charac ters depicted
th erein express authentic Cree k , , , feelings and views of the world ,"
while wha t we are offered "is a non -Indian view of the world "
which Brown identifies as Ind ian (New York Times Book R eview,
May 25, 1980)_
This view ties in with what she had written in an ea rlier essay, " An
Old -Time Indi an Attack Conducted in T wo Parts" ( Yardbird
R eader, Vol. 5, pp . 77-84), in which she speaks of two "implicit
ra cist as.sumptions a bout Na tive American culture and liter ature":
that the white man "has the ability to perceive and master th e essen tial beliefs, values and emo tions of persons from Nat ive American
comm unities," and that "pr ayers. chanu . and stories weaseled out by
the ear ly white ethnogra phers which are now collected in
ethnological jo urnals. are public property," Q.u otin g Louis Simpson
who had said that in "the new poems we were writing in the sixties .
, , , we wer e trying to use th e Ind ian as a mea ns of expressing our
feeling about th e repressed side of Americ a ," she rema rks that th is is
to reduce " Native American people to th e grossest stereotype of all:
th e litera ry device ." She relates how her Navajo stude nts had found
Oliver LaFar ge's La ughing Boy a failure "as an expression of .. .
Na vajo emotions and behavior ," and in another connection she has
mentioned how th ey laughed when th ey read Jer ome Roth enberg's
versions of "Tra ditional Poet ry" and com pared th em with th eir own
original ch an ts. In other words, what the whil es produce is hardly
th e real thing, a view which is also held by J ames Welch , who has
said : "I ha ve seen wor ks written about Indi ans by whites ... but only
an Indian knows who he is."
On e conclusion to be drawn from this is th at Indi ans must be more
active in presenting thei r own story . It is therefore not surprising th at
when Silko had com pleted Ceremony. she was anxious to get it out in
time for th e Bicenten nial : as she said . "I just want to m ake sure th at
40
· .. American s ca n be reminded that there are different ways to look
at th e pa st 200 years." This attitude was probably behind th e fact
that she let herself be pe rsu aded to work " Lu llaby" into a pla y, even
though she does not feel drama to be her medium . She also accepted
a commission from Marlon Brande and Jack Beck to write a film
scr ip t (which still ha s not been used) depicting the arrival of the first
Europeans at Zuni Pueblo in 1540 , as seen from a Pueblo perspective .
In fiction , meanwhile , Sitko ha s said that her "n ext novel is going
to be about the fun ction of humor . I got to th inking about funny
stories. Whatever just happened , it would be related to other things
that had happened ," that is, people around you would tell of sim ilar
or even worse occurrences so that "p rett y soon , after the whole thing
is over with, things ar e back in perspective. The fun ction of humor is
very serious and very comp lex" (The Third Woman, p . 23). And she
has also indicated that she intends to write a novel about Geronimo ,
probably the Ger onimo who traveled around the country selling his
hat as well as buttons cut off from his coat as expensive souvenirs at
each place his train stop ped. to people who did not suspect that he
had provided himself with a large stock of them .
There is undoubtedly a great store of material in the Indian ex perience, and it is hardly surprising that the renaissance of Native
Am erican literature now also includes novels . To be sure, Indians
have used thi s fonn before, most notably D'Arcy McNickle in 1936
with The Surrounded, which in certain respects foreshadowed the
outstanding trio we now have : Momaday's Howe Made of Dawn
(1968 ), Welch's Wint er in the Blood (1974), and Silko 's Ceremony .
The three parts of the Indian experience -the mythical ,
historical, and current elements -are not equally represented in
these novels. While Welch ha s set his book on a Montana Reserva tion , just as Momaday ha s turned to Jemez Pueblo and Silko to
41
Laguna. he deals much less than the orhers with the traditions and
the history of his tribe, concentra ting instead on rhe everyday life of
th e present . At th e sam e rime, th ey all deal with Indians who, more
than whites, suffer from th e probl ems of acculturation. Living with
violence , and being unsure about th eir roots , th ey have [0 learn to
face th e reality of their situation, to discover that things are not just
black and white, to accept th e past and th eir origins , and to come to
terms with the problems of human nature , such as th e existence of
evil: only then can th ey get rid of the winter in their blood and ga in
some sort of emotional wholeness. While Silko joins Momaday in letting the protagonist go through ceremonies with a medi cine man ,
and even sets her whole story in the framework of her trib e's
mythology. she is closer to Welch in the sense that. like him. she
clearly speaks for Everyman . Ceremony is a very rich book . and many
agree with Frank MacShane. who said in his review of th e novel that
it not only confirm ed that she is exceptionally gifted , but also
established her "without quest ion as th e most accomplished Indian
writer of her generation ."
Since Leslie Marmon was introduced to Scandinavian myths and
stori es in th e fifth grade. she has writt en many tales herself. and undoubtedly she has further stories to t~J1 . Having given us lasting pictures of her tribe and her locality. she is - in the best sense of th e
word -a regional writer ; she is a Native American storyt eller in that
she reflects many aspects of the Indian 's situation ; and she is an
American writer in that in Ceremo ny she has ra ised the life and pro blem s of a minority to th e level of general signi ficance .
What made the deepest impression upon her in th e Scandinavian
book was "T wilight of th e Gods ," a descripti on from Nor se
42
mytho logy of h ow the gods would die in a holocaust and time wou ld
en d . This was tragic a nd upseuing to her, because in Laguna . "we
believe th a t those times did not truly end , but that thi ngs ch ange ."
And in th e years since then she ha s come to the conclusion that a
chief reason the Lagunas have this b elief is t hat their oral tradition
constitutes a living presence . Silko has d emonstrated this vital
presence to a ll of us. Feeling en tirel y secure in her Laguna heritage.
blessed with a wider vision , this natural storyteller ha s made signifi cant contributions to American liter ature .
4'
PRI MARY SOURCES
BOO KS
Laguna WOIn<I,,: po enu by Lejlie Silko. Gr~n fidd Center, N.Y.: G rt enfidd
Revitw Prns , 1974.
Ceremo"y (nove l ). New York: Vi kin g , 19 77 . Rep r i nt ed i n p ape r ·
b ack , New York : Signet. 1978.
St orytell er (a se q uen ce of poems an d sto r ies ). New York : Viki ng .
1981.
POEM S
" Poe m FOT Myself And Mei: Conce rn ing Ab ortion ," Fi rst published
in The Journa l of Elhnic Studies. 2: 2 (Sum me r 1974) , 66. Included in Lagu ll<l
Womo" (hereafter ab brevia ted LW) and in Storyteller (here after ST) .
-ree'oe. A Laguna Coyote Story ." LW , ST,
" Wh en Su n Ca me to Riv erwc m an." G~t:t:nfl eld R eview, 3:2 ( 1973 ).
67-68 . LW.
" Poem fOT Ben Barney," LW ,
"Love Poem." LW .
"Slim Man Canyon ." LW .
" W h er e Mou n t ai nli on L aid Down wit h De er , " N orthwut R evie w.
13:2 (1973), 34 ·3~ , LW . ST .
" Four Mountain Wolves ," LW.
"Si'ahh Aash ." LW .
" Mesita Men ." LW .
" Pra ye r to t he P a cifi c . " C hico go R e vie w. 24 :4 ( Sp ri n g 19 73 ) ,
93 ·94 . LW , ST.
" Ind ian 5ong : Surviva l." Ibid .• 94·96. LW , ST.
" In Cold Stor m Light ." Que/tal. 2 :3 (Su m me r 1972), 46 , as "Snow
Elk ." LW . ST .
45
"Sun Children." Ibid .• 47. LW .
" Hawk and Sna ke. " Chicago R n."ew, l!4:4 (Spring 197: ), 98. LW .
"T h e Time W e Cli mbed Snake Mountain. " Ibid .. 99 . LW . ST.
" Horses at Va lley Store." Ibid .. 99·100 . LW . ST .
" Prep ara tion,." Ibid .• 100. LW . ST.
"Deer Song. " Th e j ournal oj Elhnic Siudies. 2:2 (Summ er
1974).
69 .
ST .
"Prophec.:y of Old Wom an Moun tain ." Ibid .• 70 .
"Story· telling ." Ibid .•
ST .
" Alas ka n Mou n tai n Poem * 1." Ke nn e th Rooe n , cd . , Voices of th e
Rainbow.. COfitemporary Pod ry b, Nalive Amnic'I1U. New Yor k : Viking , 1975 ,
pp. 17-18.
" A Hu nti ng Story ." A : A Journal oj Con lemporary Lilerature. 1:1
(Fall 1976). 11· 15, and Jarnes L . White , ed . , Th e Fint Slcin Around Me: Con·
temporary American Tribal Podry. Moorehe a.d, Minnesota : The Terri tor ial
Press, 1976, pp . 72·75 . ST.
" How to Write a Poem Ab o ut th e Sky ." W h it e . T he Fi rst Shn
p . 76 . ST .
"SIOr y from Bu r Co u n t ry ." A : A j outn41 oj Conlempora ry Lit era·
l ure, 2:2 (Fall 1977) , 4·6. a.n d Antae...... 27 (Aut um n 1977). 62 -64. ST .
"Inca n raricn." eene Frumk in and St anley Noye o, edo. , Th e I nd ia n
Rio Grand e: R ecent PoemJjrom Thru Cultures. Los Ceri llos. New Mexico : San
MaK OS Press, 1977, pp . 101· 102 . ST .
"Deer Dance /For You r Return ." Ibid ., pp . 103 · 105 , and Columb ia :
A Magazin e oj Poetry and Pro. e, fil II 1977, p p . 9· 11. ST.
"S keleto n Fixe" , Story ." Sun Traclu : A n American In di an Lit erary
MagariM, 4 (1978). 2·3 . ST.
n·74.
STO RIES
Ma n 10 Send Ra.in Clouds." N ew Me;llico Quarterl"
38 :4/3 9:1
(Winter·Spri ng 1969),1 33· 156. ST .
" T ony's Story ." Thund erbird (l ite r u y m a.gaz ine of Ihe studen ts of
the Un i~nity of New Mexico), 1969, pp. 2·4 . ST.
" Ye llow W om a.n ," Ken n e lh Rooen , e d .. Th e Ma n /0 Send R a in
Clouds : CQflt emporary Storie. by Amen'can India as. New Yor k : Viking, 1974 ,
pp . 33,45. ST .
"Unci., Ton y', Goat." ROSIen . Th e Man . pp. 93 · 100. ST.
"A Gero nimo Seery.' Dick Lourie , ed., Come to Pol«t: Eleven CQfI ·
temporary Amnican In dian Poets. Tnunansburg . N,Y , : 1m: Croai ng Press.
1974, pp . 8 1·94 . ST.
'The
46
"Bruma." ROKn, The Man , pp , 149-154.
"jrom H u m aw e ep i , t he War ri o r Pr ie. t. ·· Ro sen , The Man, pp .
161-168.
"Laughing an d Laug h ing ." Lou rie , Clime fa Power, p. 99.
'"Lull aby ," Chicago R eview, 26 :1 (Su m mH 1974) , 10·1 7 , an d Yard ·
bird R eader, 3 (1974), 87 ,95. ST .
'"Storyteller ." Puerto del Sol, 14:1 (Fall 1975), 1l ·25. ST.
T he following two eJlcerpl! from Ceremony were published before th e novel appeared:
'"from a novd no t yet tided
Th e Journal oj Ethnic St udies , 3 :1
(Spring 1975), 72·87 , an d
"Gallup , New Mexico _ Indian Capital of th e World ." New Am er .
ica: A Review , 2: 3 (Summer ·Fall 1976), 30·32.
"Coyot e H o ld s a Full H o u se in H is Han d
T ri Quart erl y , 4 8
(Spri ng 1980),166· 174. ST.
PLAYS AND FILM SCRI PTS
A
o ne -act p la y fo r the Amer ic an Bic enl e n nia l T bea rer Pr oj ec t,
sponsored by Ihe San Francisco City Arts Commission , This adaptat ion by Silko
and Frank Chin of "Lullaby" waspetformed in San Francisco in 1976, bu t has
not b«n p ublisbed .
Film Scri pt for Ja ck Beck and Mar lon Bran da de picli ng the Cor·
onadc Expedition of 1540 from a Native American perspecti"t! , Sent to
Hollywood in 1977, ad ap ted by Har ry Brown, but so far nOl used .
" Esto yehm u u t and the Ku ni d eeya h (Arrowboy a nd the Destroye rs}."
A Lagu na Pueblo Na rra tive Adap ted for Film by Leslie Marmon Silko and Den·
nis W . Carr. Dra ft , No""mber 1978, pp . (1·34]. Presently (1980) being filmed
with a gra nt from the Nat ional Endowment for the H uma nities , Media Division.
CRIT ICISM AND LECT URES
'"Foreword , " to Aar on Ya va . Binder Towns oj th e Navajo Nation .
Alamo , California: Holmgangcr Press, 1975, pp . [3·4], and Yard bird R eader, 3
(1974),98-105.
'"An Old ·Ti me In d ian Au a ck Co nducte d in Tw o Pa ri s. " Yar dbird
Reade r, 5 (1976), 77·84.
" N at ive Ame rican Llteraru re and Ih e Uses of En gli sh ." Lecture at
th e English Inslilute , Harva rd , September I , 1979. NOI p ublished .
" T h ey W e re t he Lan d's ;" a rev iew of Dee Br own , Creelt Mar, 's
Blood . The N ew Yor~ Times Boo~ Re view, May 2:., 1980, pp. 10, 22 .
47
TAP ES
" T h e La gu n a Regul a rs a nd Gero n imo " (Silko readi ng " A Geronimo
Sto ry:' with a brief in troduction). Phcnorape. 1977, made available for we by
A4wesasn e Noles, Moh awk Nation, via Roosevdu.>wn, N .Y. 156SS.
" Running on the Edge of th e Rai nbow: Lagu na Stories and Poem s. "
A videotaped conversation with Leslie Marmon Silko (1979), produttd by
Lawrence J. Even and directed by De nnis W . Carr , Ava ilable thr ough the Divi·
sion of Medi a and ItUtl1,lction al Services, Univenitv of Arizona , Tucson , Arizona
8!>7%1.
INT ER VIEWS, AlITO BIOG RAPHICAL I NFO RMATIO N , ETC.
" Biog ra p h ica l I nf orm ati on , " i n Lesl ie Si lko , Lagu na W om a n , p p .
M ·S!>.
Leiter to Ab ra ham Cha pman , quoted in his Lileratur e of th e Ame n '·
can Indiaru : Views and Int npu tat ioru. New York : New Ameri can Library ,
197!>, pp . !>·6 .
" A Con ver sa tion wit h Lesli e Si lko ." Vi d eo ta p e (197!» , produced b y
Lawrence J. Even and Dennis W. Carr. Not availa ble (or d istribu tion , bu t copy
available for viewing through the Sou t hwest Folklor e Center Arch ive. Unive rsit y
of Arizona .
La wrence J . Even and Den nis W . Carr, ed s" "A Conversatio n wit h
Leslie Ma rmon Silko. " Sun Trac Ju: An Amencan Indw n Literary Magl1tine, S, I
(Fall 1976),28·".
I nterviews wit h Per Seyent ed , J an ua r y 7, 1976 , and Se pt emb er 12 ,
1978. To be published in 198 1 in A m erican Studies in Scandi navia.
Stein Kagge , cd. , " Det er en som t a skr ive" (" W r iting is a lon ely
activity" ). In terview, A/tenpo Slen (an Oslo. Norway, newspa per ). Sept ember 14.
1978, p . 5.
Law re nc e J. Eve rs, ed . , " A Con versat ion with Fra nk W a ter s" (with
Silko as one of t he pa rticip an ts) . Sun TttJclt:s: An Amen can Indian Ld erary
Magazin e, !> (1979), 61·68.
J am es Fi tzge rald a nd J oh n H ud ak , c d s. , " Le sli e Sil ko: St orytelle r "
(interview ). PerJolUl, 1980, pp. 2 1·S8.
Dexter Fisher , ed., "S tories a nd Their T ellers: A Conv en at ion with
Leslie Ma rmon Silko ," in De"ter Fisher, ed ., The Third Woman: Minorily
Wom en Wnt ers of the United States. Boston: Hough ton Mifflin Co. , 1980 , pp.
is-sa.
N ot e:
48
Dr .
W.
Da vid
La ir d .
Uni versi t y
Librar ia n .
University
of Ari ·
zona , T unon , is building a Silko coll«tion at Ihe Un ive...ity Library. and Silko
has agreed to depos it her material with him.
SELECTED SECONDARY SOURCES
WR IT INGS ON SIL KO
LaVonne Ruoff, " Ritu a l an d Re newal : Ker es Traditions in Ih e
Short FiClion of Leslie Silko ." MELUS, 5:4 (Winte r 1978), 2 ·17.
Chillies R. Lillso n, a chapler on Ceremony in his A merican Indian
Fiction. Albuquerque: Unive...ity of New Muico Press, 1978, pp. 150 · 161.
Dav id B . Es pey , " En d i n gs in Con l empora ry I n di a n Fi c lio n . "
Western Ammcan Literature, 15:2 (Augus l 1978), 153·139.
Edi l h Bli c ksil ver , " T ra d ition a lism vs. Mod ern ily : Leslie Sil ko on
American Indian Wome n." Southw est Review, 64:2 (Sprin g 1979), 149·160 .
Paul a Gunn Allen , " A SlTanger in My Own Life : Alie n a lion in
Native America n Prose a nd POdry: II ." ASAIL Ne wsletter, NS 3:2 (Spring
1979), 16·23.
Ron ald E. Mcfarland , "Leslie Silko 's Slary o f Storie. : ' A : a joum41
of conte mporory literature, 4:2 (Fall 1979), 18·23.
A lelia of pape'" pro:stnted al the Rocky Mountai n MLA in October
1978 will form the basis for "A Special Symposium Issue on Leslie Marmon
Silko's C....e m ony, Guest Ediled by Kathleen M. Sands ," 10 appear as Vol. !>, No.
I, of American [ndum QlUlrterly. II will contain contributions by Kalh leen M.
Sands . Paula Gunn Allen , Peter G. Beidler , Susan J. Scarberry, Caro l Mitche ll ,
Elaine Ja hne r, Ro bert C. Bell , A. LaVonne Ruoff, and La wrence J. Evers,
A.
REVIEWS Of CEREMONY
Washington Post BooA World. Ap ril 24 , 1977 , p - E4 : Chill ies R .
Larson.
New YorA Rev'ew of Boolc.s. May 26. 1977 , p p. 40 ·42: Roger Sale.
Harp er's, J une 1977. pp . 80·82 ; Hayden Carruth .
N ew Yo rA T im es BooA R tview, J u n e 12 . 19 7 7 , p . I !> : f ra n k
MacShane .
NewsweeA, July 4, 1977, p. 73: Millgo Jefferson.
ChriJtian Science Monitor , August 24. 1977, p. 31: Dian a Rowan.
Los Angel es Tim es Booll R evi ew, Aug u. t 28, 1977 . p. 20 : Alan
Cheu.se .
49
W e:! /t". American Li le ro.t u re , 12 :3 (1 977). pp . %42 ·%43: Jack
Davis.
Amen'can /n dio.n Quo.rterl"
3: 4 (1 977 ·1 97 8). pp. 357 ,35 8: p..t .. r
Ikidl..r.
ASAIL N ewddttT. NS 2 :1 (Spring 1978), 8· U : Robert Sa~.
L.
G.
FURT HE R REFER ENCE
M . Gunn, Schat ·Chen . H i:!t or"
Traditio n:! an d Narrat ive :! of
the Quere:! /n dw m of Lo.gUnll o.nd Acoma . Albuquerque : Albri ght an d Ander ·
son , 1917 .
Edw ard P . Dozi..r , T h e Pu e blo India n:! of North A m erica . N..w
Yor" : Holt Ri....h art and WiIl$ton. 1970.
Alfonso Oni. , .-d . , New Pef:lpectiw :! on th e Pueblo:! . Albuqu..rq ue: Univenily of N..w
Mn ico Press, 197%.
Paul a Gunn AlI ..n , " T h .. San..d Ho op: A Co nt<"m pora r y In d ian
Perspect ive on America n Ind ian Litera tu re, " in Abra ham Cha pman, ed.,
L~eralure of the Amen'can / ndw m ; VieW:land Inl ffpte laliOtU, N.-w Yor k: N..w
Am.-rica n Libr ary , 1975, pp. 111·13 5.
Joe S. San do , Th e Pue blo In d ia,". Sa n Fra nci sco : Ind ian Hi storian
Prns , 1976 .
Gea ry Hobson , " Remembe ring lhe Earth " (p p . I ·ll) and ''The Ril;<" of Ihe Whi le
Sh ama nism all a N..w Vn-sion of Cult ural Im pnialism" (pp . 100"·108), in Geary
Hobson . ed., Th e R eme m bered &nth: An AnthologJ of Contemporary N ative
Amen'can Literature. Albuquerqu..: R<"d Earth Pr eM, 1979.
John
50
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